Search Data Shows Political Bias On Google, Bing, Yahoo 10/…

Search bias continues to rack up share of mind for marketers.

A new Searchmetrics study suggests Google tends to give greater visibility to a higher proportion of search results critical of President Donald Trump, while Bing and Yahoo tend to be more
pro-Trump. The data also shows Google serves us more results from liberal news media than from news sites that are more conservative.

The findings show approximately 60% of the top ten
results for Trump-related searches on Google.com are critical of U.S. President Trump, while approximately 40% are neutral and none are deemed to be positive. On Yahoo, 40% of the results were
positive about the President, while Bing displayed approximately 49% pro-Trump results.

The 76 media websites analyzed range from abcnews.go.com to bloomberg.com, and from foxnews.com to
huffingtonpost.com and wsj.com.

Searchmetrics analyzed the sentiment of the top ten search results that appear when Trump-related keywords are entered into a variety of search engines and
social networks. The analysis is based on one sample that Searchmetrics collected at the end of August.

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Based on an analysis of 76 English-language news media sites, the findings suggests
Google displays significantly more results from liberal media, 28.5%, than from conservative sites, 3.4%.

The liberal news media have become more visible on Google.com since Donald
Trump’s inauguration. When Searchmetrics compared the search visibility on the sites over time, it found the visibility of more liberal leaning sites rose since Donald Trump’s
inauguration. During the same time the visibility of conservative media sites – more likely to be favorable to Trump – shows only a negligible improvement in visibility in Google
searches.

Even Trump’s media properties, such as trump.com, along with his twitter profile and donaldtrump.com appears far less frequently in Google’s top ten results than they do
in the results of other search engines.

In the “top tweet” results in Twitter search, sentiment seems mainly critical of the President, but the tweets marked
“Latest,” the most recent, about him include many more neutral and positive messages. This suggests that tweets that are mostly critical of Trump either generate a large number of interactions
or they are moderated more favorably by Twitter.

The search results on Pinterest, Tumblr and 9GAG are primarily critical of Trump, while the majority of the results marked “Top” on
Instagram are favorable or neutral towards him.